3 Massachusetts police officers are accused of sexually abusing girl in youth program. She later committed suicide while pregnant.

Three Massachusetts police officers are being accused of sexually abusing a girl who had participated in a police youth program. She later committed suicide while pregnant and told friends the child belonged to one of the cops.

The shocking accusations were made in a 60-page redacted internal affairs report about the Stoughton Police Department.

The girl was a part of the Stoughton Police Explorers Program when she was 13 and was involved in an inappropriate relationship with officer Matthew Farwell when he was 27 years old and she was 15 years old, according to the Boston Globe.

The other two officers involved in the alleged sexual assault of the girl were his twin brother William Farwell, and the supervisor of the explorers program, Robert C. Devine.

The investigation found hundreds of explicit messages between the officers and the girl over several years.

In February 2021, the girl was found dead at the age of 23 and a medical examiner found that she had died from suicide. The examiner also found that she was pregnant.

Keep reading

New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern at the U.N.: ‘Disinformation’ Should Be Controlled Like Guns, Bombs, and Nukes

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called for more “collective” action in her address to the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, especially on the issues of climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, pandemic response, and opposing wars of aggression such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ardern’s authoritarian impulses were on display in her call for tighter regulations on Internet speech, although she insisted she values free speech and merely wishes to cleanse “disinformation” from international discourse.

Ardern portrayed the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which New Zealand addressed with some of the heaviest lockdowns to be found outside of communist China, as a painful lesson that “schooled” mankind in the importance of “collective action.”

“It forced us to acknowledge how interconnected, and therefore how reliant we are on one another,” she said of the pandemic. “We move between one another’s countries with increasing ease. We trade our goods and services. And when one link in our supply chain is impacted, we all are.”

Ardern explicitly called for the collectivist “lessons” of the pandemic to be applied to climate change.

“The next pandemic will not be prevented by one country’s efforts, but by all of ours. Climate action will only ever be as successful as the least committed country, as they pull down the ambition of the collective,” she said.

Ardern called for stronger, more lavishly-funded “multilateral” institutions, expressing strong support for the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and Paris climate change agreement. She then somewhat paradoxically presented Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as an example of an authoritarian regime simply ignoring global institutions to fulfill selfish ambitions.

“Let us all be clear: Russia’s war is illegal. It is immoral. It is a direct attack on the U.N. Charter and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for,” she said.

Keep reading

USPS spied on ‘MAGA’ protesters, right-wing groups, gun rights activists, documents show

The U.S Postal Service spied on ‘MAGA’ protesters, gun rights activists and other right-wing groups between late 2020 and early 2021, according to records obtained by The Washington Times. ‘MAGA’ is former President Donald Trump’s slogan meaning “Make America Great Again.”

Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, obtained heavily redacted files detailing the USPS’ surveillance activities from September 2020 to April 2021, which included a secret effort to surveil social media known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP).

The USPS monitored the activities of gun rights activists, protesters planning to demonstrate against police in Louisville, Kentucky after the shooting of Breonna Taylor, and right-wing groups traveling to Washington, D.C. after the 2020 election. 

Eddington said the documents demonstrate the USPS’ surveillance capabilities.

Keep reading

FBI Police officer charged with felony soliciting minor via computer by Bridgeport, West Virginia, detective

A member of the FBI Police has been charged with soliciting a minor via computer by Bridgeport Police.

Dale Edward Cheuvront Jr. was charged by Bridgeport Police Detective Lt. Gary Weaver, who has prosecuted scores of similar cases.

Cheuvront Jr., 52, of Fairmont, used the profile name “Don Marco” to contact a female Aug. 19 on a social media site who “stated she was 13,” Weaver alleged.

Despite the age reference, Cheuvront continued to communicate with the female, and a day later “stated that he wanted to meet with the female and the conversation turned sexual,” Weaver alleged.

Cheuvront described a sex act, set up a meeting location and was to “sneak into the house to have sex with her,” Weaver alleged.

The FBI Police work to protect the FBI, its employees and U.S. facilities and also identify potential threats and prevent and investigate crimes, the agency said in a job description brochure posted to the internet.

Keep reading

Senator Wyden: US military bought mass monitoring tool that includes email and browsing data

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has revealed that the US Naval Investigative Service (NCIS) has a contract for “Augury” – a mass monitoring tool that reportedly covers 93% of the world’s internet traffic and provides access to petabytes of current and historical data.

Wyden made the revelation in a recent letter that urged officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Defense (DOD), and Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate their department’s “warrantless purchase and use of records revealing the websites Americans have accessed online.”

The Senator wrote that public contracting records show that NCIS has a contract for Augury and that these records show that Augury provides access to network data “from over 550 collection points worldwide.” Wyden added that these records show Augury “is updated with at least 100 billion new records each day” and “confirm that Augury provides access to email data…and data about web browser activity.”

Not only does Wyden’s letter highlight this Augury contract but it also reveals that Wyden’s department was recently contacted by a whistleblower who had filed formal complaints “regarding the warrantless purchase and use of netflow data by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).” This whistleblower told Wyden’s department that NCIS is “purchasing access to data, which includes netflow records and some ‘communications content” from Team Cymru – a data broker that offers access to Augury.

Keep reading

House Democrats Pass Police Funding Bills Amid Crime Crisis

House Democrats passed a package of bills on Thursday aimed at bolstering police funding and public safety after Republican lawmakers accused them of being soft on crime amid a surge in violent crime across the United States.

Lawmakers voted to pass four bills as part of the package: the Mental Health Justice Act of 2022, the Invest to Protect Act of 2022, the Break the Cycle of Violence Act, and the VICTIM Act of 2022.

The Mental Health Justice Act of 2022, sponsored by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), creates a grant program for states and local governments to train and dispatch mental health professionals to respond to emergencies involving behavioral health, as opposed to police.

Elsewhere, the Invest to Protect Act of 2022, sponsored by moderate Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), raises funding for smaller police departments that employ fewer than 200 law enforcement officers.

The Break the Cycle of Violence Act, sponsored by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), provides grants to fund community violence intervention initiatives in areas with higher rates of homicides and community violence.

Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), who introduced the VICTIM Act, called its passing a “major win for America’s public safety,” and said it passed the U.S. House with support from Democrats and Republicans.

The bill provides funding to local police departments to hire victim support personnel along with investigators to aid in solving unsolved homicides and violent crimes.

Specifically, the legislation would “establish a Department of Justice grant program to hire, train, and retain detectives and victim services personnel to investigate shootings and support victims,” Demings said in a statement.

Keep reading

This Biden Proposal Could Turn US into A “Digital Dictatorship”

Last Wednesday, President Biden was widely praised in mainstream and health-care–focused media for his call to create a “new biomedical research agency” modeled after the US military’s “high-risk, high-reward” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. As touted by the president, the agency would seek to develop “innovative” and “breakthrough” treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and diabetes, with a call to “end cancer as we know it.”  

Far from “ending cancer” in the way most Americans might envision it, the proposed agency would merge “national security” with “health security” in such as way as to use both physical and mental health “warning signs” to prevent outbreaks of disease or violence before they occur. Such a system is a recipe for a technocratic “pre-crime” organization with the potential to criminalize both mental and physical illness as well as “wrongthink.”

The Biden administration has asked Congress for $6.5 billion to fund the agency, which would be largely guided by Biden’s recently confirmed top science adviser, Eric Lander. Lander, formerly the head of the Silicon Valley–dominated Broad Institute, has been controversial for his ties to eugenicist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relatively recent praise for James Watson, an overtly racist eugenicist. Despite that, Lander is set to be confirmed by the Senate and Congress and is reportedly significantly enthusiastic about the proposed new “health DARPA.”

This new agency, set to be called ARPA-H or HARPA, would be housed within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would raise the NIH budget to over $51 billion. Unlike other agencies at NIH, ARPA-H would differ in that the projects it funds would not be peer reviewed prior to approval; instead hand-picked program managers would make all funding decisions. Funding would also take the form of milestone-driven payments instead of the more traditional multiyear grants.

ARPA-H will likely heavily fund and promote mRNA vaccines as one of the “breakthroughs” that will cure cancer. Some of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers that have produced some of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, stated just last month that “cancer is the next problem to tackle with mRNA tech” post-COVID. BioNTech has been developing mRNA gene therapies for cancer for years and is collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create mRNA-based treatments for tuberculosis and HIV.

Other “innovative” technologies that will be a focus of this agency are less well known to the public and arguably more concerning.

Keep reading